The founders of All Along Press talk about printing the concordance texts and demonstrate part of the process. Smudge the dog performs tricks.

When you enter stylus, one of the first things you see is a steel table, with a half-circle cut from it, where a concrete pillar shoots through it and two floors of Pulitzer building. On top of the table are what look like newspapers. You start to read one (yes, you’re allowed to touch them) and it feels like you’re doing so from inside a dream; the text consists of a column of repeating words and what, at first skim, is gobbledygook to either side of it. Here’s a short section from one of these papers:

“No one charged us a penny for our pleasure in…disconcerting. I appear to be strangely distracted and barely…bid to become an action star proper looks a fairly safe bet. Just…and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his…by BBC political editor, Nick Robinson.”

“It’s kind of interesting to think about what sentence might have gone with what paper,” says Courtney Henson, our visitor services manager.

These “concordance texts” have their own unique trajectory in becoming part of stylus. Each week, Ann Hamilton chooses specific words, and with computer software, pulls sentences containing those words from the RSS feeds of eight international newspapers to generate the document. An index of those words is ordered alphabetically down the center of the page so you can see how often they’re mentioned in the collage of articles.

“She’s directing that news around the words this exhibition hovers on,” Courtney says, noting two words that Ann has chosen before: light and listening.

Besides in the Entrance Gallery, concordances are placed on the Mezzanine and near the miked table on the stairs to the Lower Gallery. Gallery assistants invite visitors to read the concordances out loud at these stations as a way to activate the installation and be a part of stylus. (You can see Ann reading a concordance on one of the ladders, at the opening here.)

On the top, right corner of a concordance, next to Ann Hamilton’s name is “All Along Press,” the tag of the printing press that is printing, folding and delivering this weekly for the duration of the exhibition.

“If you come in any Friday afternoon, that’s what we’ll be doing for the next six months,” says Elysia Mann.

Elysia Mann and Steven Brien founded All Along Press, a cooperative printing shop, two and a half years ago on St. Louis’s hopping Cherokee Street, a confluence of art galleries, antique shops and Mexican restaurants. Since Rachel and I worked with them last year on our Urban Alchemy guerrilla ad campaign, they’ve moved down the street to a bigger space to fit their growing enterprise. The concordances are their first long-term printing job that requires so many prints be made within a relatively short amount of time.

“We have a few hours to print a hundred and fifty of them by hand and get them to you guys by the next morning,” explains Steven. It usually takes the printmakers around six hours to complete the project.

Every Friday, Ann emails the two a file of the concordance, which they then have printed out at Kinko’s. That copy is what they use to make a film positive, by imbuing it with baby oil. The baby oil method helps them meet their deadline and also gives the final prints a more handmade feel than an actual film positive, which is what Ann Hamilton wants.

Each week, Ann picks a different shade of ink, to further add to the novelty of each paper, and sometimes Steve and Elysia make their own shade off of what Hamilton has wanted in the past. As with other aspects of stylus–the bell speakers, the paper hands–the concordances have been prescribed a basic structure by Ann Hamilton and then given leeway to evolve as others have a hand in their making.

For  a mere $2, you can own one of these prints, designed by Ann Hamilton and facilitated by our friends at All Along Press.

A visitor examines a concordance in the Entrance Gallery.